The Many Faces of Truth 

The Many Faces of Truth 

I appeared on BBC’s Moral Maze on Christmas Eve, and the subject was ‘truth’. Which got me thinking about how as historians and writers we aim for truth, but that doesn’t mean what we come up with is the only truth, or the only truth that matters. The relativity of truth comes from our unique perspective on the world, and our place in it. Which means that to some extent truth has always been political –because those perspectives and places are political.

Truth and relativity is central, too, of my book The Face that will be published by Allen Lane in the UK on 26 February (June in the US and by Hachette).

The Face: A Cultural History explores how humans have interpreted faces throughout history and how they’ve shaped our ideas about identity, morality, and social hierarchy. It starts with the recognition that the face is the only part of the body where all our senses come together –and it has a history.

Today, the face is a foundational marker of who we are—from unlocking our phones with facial recognition to having our faces stamped in our passports. In the book, I chart how we have ended up here, for it isn’t a natural or inevitable position.

New technologies and cultural innovations have transformed our conception of selfhood over time: from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century developments like digital avatars and face transplants.

Drawing on research, interviews, and personal narratives—including my own experience living with prosopagnosia (face blindness)—I probe beneath the surface to ask what our faces really say about us.

The book has been reviewed favourably by Katy Hessel in The Times, who describes it as “equal parts gripping and scholarly… a timely book that gets to the heart of contemporary society”. And by Max Liu in the Financial Times, who describes The Face as an ‘elegant and engaging history [that] examines how we have portrayed, judged and reconstructed ourselves.’

I talked more about these aspects of the face on the BBC podcast Instant Genius, and wrote about the politics of the face – with reference to Prince Andrew’s recent downfall, in an article for The Guardian.

One of the most emotive chapters of my book deals with face transplants, a subject I wrote about – again for The Guardian – on the 20th anniversary of this experimental surgery. And you want a deeper dive, here’s the accompany Today in Focus podcast.

I also wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph about the personal experience that led me to study the human face – prosopagnosia, or face blindness. That condition leads me to see the truth of the face, and how that has changed over time, rather differently.